Upward Spiral
A snail upon the concrete, half-way high,
Just scaling up the slabs to the broken-bottle prism
That shards into the crown that lacerates the sky –
It’s breaking up the straight lines, a bauble on the brutalism.
This snail is still there, years later, its shell becoming its coffin. I wonder if it were poisoned by the concrete ?
Seventh Day
And on the Seventh Day the Lord did rest,
With feet-up on a cloud –
And hereafter, in Sunday best,
We imitate his weekly quest
To switch-off from the crowd,
For ev’ry Seventh Day, the Lord makes clear
To leave the fields unploughed.
For on this day the Lord is near –
So don’t have too much fun down here,
Incase we get too loud.
But what do you suppose he does Upstairs
When punched-out from the week ?
When through with listening to prayers
And judging sins and love affairs,
And blessing all the meek,
Kicking-back with a glass of manna, say,
Or visit Zeus the Greek ?
Or maybe give the spheres a play,
Or take a jog round the Milky Way,
Or give his beard a tweak ?
Thus ev’ry Seventh Day, to decompress,
He rests his weary head –
And he commands we acquiesce
To give up any busyness
And copy in his stead.
So we must waste the day with filling pews
And quelling Monday-dread –
Half our weekend in a snooze,
A seventh of our lives we lose,
Because he swings the lead.
Stone-Sand
Shingle beaches, pebble-dashed,
Where armoured dunes are heaped and smashed
By hefting surf that tills and rolls
On up the beaches, spits and shoals,
Whatever flints that storm and time can prize
And toss like bowls –
All layered out by weight and size.
Gravels from the cliffs and beds
In blacks and greys, in blues and reds –
These bucket-breakers of the strand,
These castles that can never stand,
Upon a beach-head built by wave on wave
Of new-formed land,
Of nuggets dug from out the grave.
Pushing back against our soles,
The sucking wash between its holes –
This is no barefoot summer beach,
But haunt of limpet, kelp and leech.
Yet stones to scree to grains shall grow
Along this tidal reach
By silicates just going with the flow.
Sun Serfs
Sunflowers are conformists –
Growing equally tall,
Facing the same direction –
See one, see them all…
Until a shoot is pampered,
And displayed against a wall.
The clones out in the fields
They all droop their heads as one,
But the show-offs in the garden
They are staring at the sun.
But which will yield us seeds and oil
Once the reaping’s done ?
Wish I Were There
I should be on holiday right now,
Instead I’m still at work
Still typing out reports that won’t be read.
I should be at the seaside
Cranking what-the-butlers with a smirk,
Then fish & chips on the prom, and late to bed.
I long to swap my bowler hat
For stetson, Panama, or fez
Instead of charting overheads
With Paul the Bore and dreary Des.
I should be on holiday right now,
Not swamped in endless work
While dreaming that I’m swimming in the Med.
I should be in a cocktail bar
With the just-met eyes of a sexy Turk,
Or a charming couple from outside-Leatherhead.
I long to be in Venice,
As my corp’rate stress unwinds –
But instead the sun is trapped behind
These beige Venetian blinds.
Coasts
The Spanish have the Brava and Del Sol,
The French have the Vermeille and d’Azur,
The British have…the South, the East and West –
They’re simply places for the trains to roll.
They sound so innocent and amateur,
Before the marketeers have had them dressed.
They gave us the Jurassic, don’t forget.
What next ? The Coccolith Coast of Dover ?
The Devonian Coast of…I don’t know…Dundee ?
The Windfarm Coast of Wales – it could be yet,
The Yorkshire Bladderwracks – think it over,
The Seaside Coast of Seaton-by-the-Sea…
Summer Begins at Midsummer
When the cuckoo changes his tune, it’s June,
The month with the longest afternoon,
When the golden hour will last an hour,
And the floral clocks are forever in flower –
It’s hardly worth the daisies to close
When a good night’s sleep is barely a doze,
And the nightingales must rush their glee
Till the sparrows peep at the crack of three.
The Travelcard Shuffle
Every morning, all Summer long,
We tie-less masses struggle aboard
The dawdling trains in the hungry platforms,
Like some suburban zombie horde.
Then staring out at rusty sidings,
Ragged lots, and the empty sweltering sky,
As the weaving rails must dance and join,
And the shapeless buddleia bushes go by.
Every evening, all Summer long,
We shirtsleeve masses of sweaty sardines
Cram airless trains on commuter corridors,
Staring at space or staring at screens.
Some folks ride on gilded viaducts,
Mutely surveying the city from high,
While we in the troughs watch the overgrown fences,
As grasping bindweeds bushes go by.
Every Sunday
For ever since I can remember,
Sundays were the worst –
Growing up in villages,
We longed for them to burst,
With their uptight prim and properness,
And Sunday-Best remarks,
With nothing ever open
’Cept the churches and the parks.
We longed for the tension to flare up
In an all-out family war –
But of course, they never would,
They just went muttering as before.
Our parents either marches us off
To hymns and holy dread,
Or took a lazy breakfast,
With the Sunday papers spread.
Then out to visit relatives,
Or kicking round at home,
Or maybe made to wash the car
Or read some worthy tome.
It was a Blue Peter sort a day,
Vaguely seen as good for us
In that terribly wannabe middle-class way,
With an Archers omnibus.
Then come the evening, on the box,
Some cop show or a flick –
And sometimes there were arguments
On who would get to pick.
Even as kids, we felt the sense
Of desperation in it all
With families forced by ritual rest
To slow down to a crawl.
With Monday looming over,
And with homework to be done,
We clung on as long as we could, until
Early to bed, no more fun.
The Longest Day of the Year
She was born at Solsticetide,
And so they named her Summer –
Blond and bright and beautiful,
And all the Spring a comer.
But once the longest day was done,
She felt the nights draw in,
Just waiting for the Winter low
To let the next begin.
Now I will barely notice how
The evenings have crept,
Until the clocks have messed about
To show how dusk has leapt.
But then, she saw a greater change
Than I, from day to day,
For she grew up in Lerwick town
And I down Jersey way.
Rhyming Couplets 